Federal and state laws require that public and private employees have an opportunity to complain of discrimination and harassment. With the passage of the first civil rights and employment laws in the mid 1960's and until the mid 1990's, such equal employment opportunity (“EEO”) complaints were generally in the form of Charges of Discrimination filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) or a Fair Employment Practices Agency (“FEPA” or “FEP Agency”) or Formal Agency Charges filed with the employee's public sector employer agency. In the late 1990's, the United States Supreme Court mandated that public and private employers provide a mechanism for employees to file informal or internal complaints of discrimination. Most of the employers that implemented a complaint mechanism did not provide a formalized process or means to intake, track or store the complaints.
Currently, an employer has a legal obligation under various state and federal laws and regulations, including EEOC Guidelines and Management Directive No. 110, to investigate and respond to formal charges of discrimination. An employer also has a legal obligation to investigate and respond to internal complaints of fair employment practice issues. Public and private employers must also be able to track complaints, the responses and their respective outcomes. Employers have been encouraged by the courts to provide independent investigations and tracking of such complaints.
In the past, these EEO complaints were received in a typewritten or handwritten form, and all complaints were processed manually. The manual processing of the application is a tedious, labor-intensive and time-consuming operation. Moreover, the requiring of filing either by hand or in typewritten form is cumbersome for the employees. Manual processing of paper documents is prone to loss through mis-filing or other misadventure. In addition to the potential loss of the documents was the potential dissemination of personal information and possible violation of privacy laws.
The advent of the Internet has enabled many users to have access to remote servers and databases via the World Wide Web (“WWW”) using standard web browsers on client machines that interact with web servers and other processing capabilities at the remote site. To date, however, no EEO compliance system has utilized the capabilities of the Internet. There is, therefore, a need in the art for an EEO compliance mechanism that is capable of utilizing a wide area network such as the Internet to enhance privacy, to automate routine tasks and to enable the handling of EEO that is applicable to private and public sector employers and governmental compliance entities.